Steam Tops Concurrent User Record as Client Beta Gets FPS Counter

Valve began rolling out a Steam Beta Client Update on January 2, introducing new features including a slew of new broadcasting improvements, an official in-game frames per second counter overlay along with other fixes.

Steam users can access the client beta overlay by opting into the beta via the Steam client settings and then activating the counter in client’s in-game settings. The full list of improvements and fixes introduced with the latest update follows:

General

Reduced CPU usage when drawing animated images or videos

Fixed video playback performance regression on Mac OS X and Linux

Added FPS counter to Steam Overlay

Fixed reloading settings values in the Steam Overlay

Broadcast

Improved capture performance in D3D9 games

Improved audio/video synchronization

Improved automatically adjusting video encoding bit rate when a change in available upload bandwidth is detected

Improved capture performance in OpenGL games when hardware support is enabled on machines with newer Nvidia GPUs

Added first time use and other UI to Big Picture mode

Fixed first friend invite to a broadcast sometimes getting dropped

Steam broke its peak concurrent user record over the weekend when more than 8,512,414 users logged in at the same time. Steam also surpassed user records during the holiday break, topping out with more than 8.4 million users on January 1. Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2 are currently the top three played games on the platform, respectively. The platform hit 7 million users over Thanksgiving holiday weekend in 2013.